Doing Without Delia, By Michael Booth (Independent) "Delia Smith was on fire." Slightly creepily, this culinary memoir begins with an auto-da-fé of cookbooks. Believing himself to be "a worthless fraud", food obsessive Michael Booth decides to learn real cookery at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris, even though it means transplanting his young family. Though there is plenty of the hopeless-amateur-cocks-it-up-in-the-kitchen stuff we're familiar ... [News Source]

Big names to headline Orlando Cabaret Festival (Orlando Sentinel) Christine Andreas, Andrea Marcovicci, Broadway Boys to perform here in May Great news at Mad Cow Theatre, where they're announcing as headliners of the upcoming Orlando Cabaret Festival a couple of very big names -- Christine Andreas, the Broadway veteran who played the lead in the national tour of The Light in the Piazza, and Andrea Marcovicci, who could safely be called New York cabaret ... [News Source]

Redefining what it means to be a prion (EurekAlert!) Whitehead Institute researchers have found a large number of new prions, greatly expanding scientists' notion of how important prions might be in normal biology and demonstrating that they play many and varied roles in the inheritance of biological traits. Prions are misfolded proteins that clump together in cells. The most infamous known prion -- PrP -- causes bovine spongiform encephalitis, ... [News Source]

Prions serve as important source of variation in nature (EurekAlert!) ( Cell Press ) Special proteins known as prions, which are perhaps best known as the agents of mad cow and other neurodegenerative diseases, can also serve as an important source of beneficial variation in nature, confirms a new study in the April 3 issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. After an extensive search through the genome of yeast for proteins with prion-like character, ... [News Source]

Prions are common, at least in yeast (Science News) Study suggests these proteins may not be rare in other organisms either [News Source]

Deadstock a lively issue. A subsidy that over the past five years has paid nearly $20 million to defray additional deadstock costs to farmers brought on by toughened federal guidelines concerning mad cow disease has ended, generating new health and environmental concerns. [News Source]

Deadstock a lively issue (Kingston Whig-Standard) Like most dairy farmers, Bill Moreland is resourceful and independent. Except, that is, when it comes to disposing of dead animals.[...] [News Source]